I'm very interested to see how some VPN providers react to this. For a zero logs VPN provider, if such a thing can really exist, how big of a problem is this? Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file? Usage remains the same? Surely savvy people can just use their existing VPN to buy a VPN from outside the UK.
Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.
> Presumably many customers pay with a debit/credit card already so there's some PII on file?
Yes. But I think most of the zero logs providers will remove the identifiable payments details after a certain about of time. e.g. Mullvad have a specific policy relating to what is stored and retention time (I am not affiliated with Mullvad, I just use their service).
I believe a whole host of VPN providers have no real need to comply with this amendment if it passes the Commons.
The providers are structured in a way that makes forcing compliance difficult and have built their whole business model around this. NordVPN is registered in Panama for example and Mullvad lets you send cash in the mail and doesn't store any user details (even a hashed email).
It'll be interesting to see how & who reacts if it does pass.
> Now more than ever, trusting a US jurisdiction VPN provider ? No thanks !
The whole point of Obscura is you aren't trusting any single company. A Swedish company and an American company would need to collude to cause a problem. Unless you know something I don't?
> The whole point of Obscura is you aren't trusting any single company.
First, Mullvad's infrastructure has been independently audited.
Mullvad integrity has also tested as proven by a legal case where they were subject to a search warrant when someone was trying to claim copyright infringement.
As far as I can tell, Obscura has not had anywhere near the same scrutiny.
Second, obscura is the first hop is it not ?
Therefore it may well "only" relay the traffic to the exit node but it is still a relay and hence open to SIGINT analysis by the US.
I would have thought therefore using Mullvad's built-in multi-hop mode on their audited platform would be the wiser decision ?
Hence why Mullvad is being used as the exit point.
You have full e2ee between yourself and Mullvad but crucially Mullvad don't know who your IP. Five eyes are already doing SIGINT on behalf of both the US and the UK government before my connection even reaches Obscura so I lose nothing but potentially gain privacy.
How is it you think a single company (Mullvad) having access to my IP and what I am browsing is less secure than splitting it up amongst multiple providers one of which being Mullvad with that audited platform you talk about?
If I wanted Tor on top I'd layer it on top too but that would still be a single point of failure.
It's open source which means I can trust having the app installed if I build from source (or I can just use Wireguard directly). I then know I'm directly connected to a Mullvad Wireguard node by checking the public key here: https://mullvad.net/en/servers
Other than Wireguard protocol being broken there is no way for Obscura to snoop presuming I check the public key. I'm not saying I trust Obscura, I'm saying with their model I don't need to trust them which is vastly superior. Nor do I need to trust Mullvad.
You keep hand waving around that Obscura are somehow untrustworthy but you have steadfastly refused to address the fact that their model does not require trust. If you trust Mullvad (which you are claiming to) please show an attack that would work to breach this model. You can't.
Sadly if you look at how the law is drafted its setup to catch companies that have a significant UK base not just those that advertise here. It is highly likely for compliance reasons (as we saw with imgur and others) that they will simply block the UK themselves.
This seems to have been posted a few times over the years, e.g. [0]. I was impressed and pleased to see that I hadn't missed the boat on this, and in fact, the project seems to still be going very strong [1]!
Perhaps a bit cynical, but it seems that as Microsoft continue to shove ads in absolutely everywhere and track everything they possibly can, Apple are content to be just marginally better rather than actually having meaningfully higher standards. Of course, it's business as usual, but we are boiling the frog for the next generation by tolerating it.
The problem is that these systems are so costly and hard to make that without a capital incentive no indipendent entity is going to make them and what entity do have an interest in making them as a "loss leader" if not monetized in any way (ads or paid product)?
Apple has been running maps for well over a decade without this. They are one of the most profitable businesses in history and have spent almost a trillion dollars in financial games to enrich stakeholders because they had so much cash to burn.
The idea that "poor little Apple is struggling without enshittifying to microptimize profit opportunities" is an utter joke.
I think they were talking about the challenge for a non Apple/Google competitor to emerge in this space with a comparable enough product to win real, meaningful marketshare.
Firefox's abysmal market share, despite being, for the average user, a strictly better experience, would incline me to agree.
Yeah Apple’s evolution over the past decade has been very frustrating and disappointing to see. It seems like whatever scraps remain of the company’s core values now exist solely with a handful of old heads at the company and will likely not survive their retirements.
A lot has changed in the tech industry, but the rapidity of hiring and expansion of headcount just seems to have engendered a broad homogenization of business strategies, design conventions, and product vision. I think they started hiring people based on narrow defined ideas about skills and resumes to fit certain roles and they all end up shuffling the same bunch of people around across the same incestuous company hiring pipelines until they’re all doing stints at every company and driving them in the same broad direction.
It would be helpful to see some additional stats, like the number of issues and the last update. Of course, these are only heuristics, but they are still helpful to see. It's often pointed out that one of the great things about Clojure is that the libraries generally don't need updating that often because the language is pretty stable. However, quite often I do find that libraries have a number of long open issues or depend on outdated, sometimes insecure, versions of Java libraries. I realise that I'm complaining about free code, so 'fork it and contribute' is a valid response, but at the risk of further fragmentation and yet another library that exists for just a short period.
Separately, I do wish Clojure would adopt a bit more of an opinionated way of doing things and coalesce around some solid core/common libraries that the official docs could point to. This year, Clojure didn't make it into the named languages list on the Stack Overflow developer survey (1.2% in 2024). It's clear that it's not all that popular, even though there's some commercial backing and a friendly community, and there just aren't enough developers to support a myriad of different ways of doing things. I do feel there needs to be a focus on getting beginners in, and that means helping them to do things easily.
> This year, Clojure didn't make it into the named languages list on the Stack Overflow developer survey (1.2% in 2024).
Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.
> I do wish Clojure would adopt a bit more of an opinionated way of doing things and coalesce around some solid core/common libraries that the official docs could point to.
> Clojure is clearly a niche language, but Stack Overflow is also not a place that Clojure developers typically go, so Clojure usage there is going to be under reported.
It seems unclear to me why Clojure developers would not go to Stack Overflow, and especially unclear why they would avoid SO more than developers in other niche languages. When I learned Clojure, I spent a very long time on SO.
I suppose I’m just a little skeptical. I often hear similar sounding rationales - “oh don’t worry, <my favorite language/technology> is under-represented by the data”. Somehow every niche technology is underreported by the data! But to an outside observer, Clojure to me seems to be used very rarely in the types of engineering work I come in contact with, and 1% doesn’t seem that wrong to me.
OTOH, 1% of a large group is still quite a lot. How many programmers are there in the world? Google says estimated 47 million. 1% of that is almost half a million people. If there are half a million Clojure programmers, Clojure is quite a successful technology! (Sadly, I doubt there are that many)...
Stack Overflow is one of those sites that benefit from a network effect. If there are few users of a particular technology on it, people are less likely to get questions answered and therefore less likely to interact with it again.
That said, it's always worth checking the numbers, so I took a look at the 2024 State of Clojure Survey. Around 18% of those surveyed used Stack Overflow, while the 2024 Python Developers Survey had at least 43% of respondents using Stack Overflow.
Now, you might well say that even so Clojure is still a niche language - and I agree. But it may be the case that instead of a 1.3% share, Clojure has a 3% share - if we assume that the Python community's usage numbers are more typical.
I’m not sure if you can draw that conclusion. The clojure survey asks where users went to interact with other people who use Clojure. Who interacts with people on SO? I’m sure a vast majority just read the answer and move on. It makes sense that a Slack server would be the #1 result.
The Python question is more broad: “Where do you typically learn about [python]?”
Posting a question on SO and having it answered is interacting with people. I'm unsure how you could interpret that any other way. And given that podcasts and YouTube were part of the answers, I think it's clear that passively listening to people counts as an interaction as well within the context of the question.
The Python question I'd say is more narrow, as it asks specifically about "new tools and technologies". What if I have a question about an tool I've been using for a while?
In any case, my point is not what market share Clojure actually has, but that there's reasonable doubt in using SO's developer survey as a basis for that answer. If a far smaller percentage of the Clojure community uses SO than is average for a language, then it's going to skew the results.
Thanks for responding, and, especially recognising the name, thanks for all your work on the Clojure ecosystem! To answer the question, for me personally, it would be largely full-stack web and data science tooling, but that's just me. I was moreso thinking out loud about the posted project and highlighting libraries that could be semi-official or strongly recommended by the community. The Clojure community offers many different libraries that, on the surface, are similar, even if each addresses a particular set of concerns. For a lowly idiot like me without enough time to spend writing code in Clojure, I'd love to just be directed to those used by the experts and have solid backing and anticipated longevity - 'gold star' libraries.
This is a good article, but in my opinion overlooks changes to the existing display accessibility features as a result of liquid glass (although I appreciate it can't cover absolutely everything). I enable high contrast in light mode (along with some other tweaks, like clearer button indicators). Unfortunately, this is quite a bit worse for me in Tahoe. I'm hoping it improves with future updates but it's annoying. I'm otherwise neutral to slightly negative on liquid glass so far.
Lasagne batteries hit the front page of reddit every couple of months. That's where I learned about galvanic corrosion in general a couple of years ago.
Funny seeing this here with your comment, as I was exploring using ECharts for a project recently to work exactly with HTMX from a Clojure backend. I eventually settled on Chart.js as I found that for my use case, I wanted the charts to more easily fit their dynamically sized container, which isn’t quite as simple with ECharts and Vega. I also didn't need particularly complex plots. Nevertheless, this is a nice project! There remain some open challenges with web-based visualisation libraries more generally around responsive design and accessibility, but we’ve come a long way.
Of course, we're sliding quite rapidly down that slippery slope here so I'm sure logging and easier government tracking would be next. The justifications will get weaker and even more lacking in supporting evidence for their implementation.
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